That’s how Danny Sullivan announced the launch of Sphinn one year ago tomorrow: July 11, 2007. He also explained how the new site works and — no less important — how to say the darn name! Who knew that, one little year later, Sphinn would become a daily must read for online marketers everywhere? Not me, that’s for sure. But I gave it a try on the first day, and was immediately hooked.

As an early adopter, I wrote about the Sphinn effect — the bump in traffic I saw when my first submission hit the home page. More recently, I’ve written from my moderator’s chair about how to tell when you’re spamming Sphinn. In this post, let’s take a look at …

Sphinn’s Early Days

While Danny’s Welcome to Sphinn story is considered the first post on Sphinn, it wasn’t the first one to go hot. If you go all the way back to the first page of published stories (i.e., stuff that hit the home page), you’ll see two posts that went hot during the private beta testing — one from Danny, and one from Gord Hotchkiss:

The first story to hit the home page after launch? That was Danny’s Sphinn Feature Wishlist discussion, which was no doubt pushed to the home page on launch since it still only has 12 votes.

Sphinn’s stories are numerically ordered when you submit, and we’re fast approaching 60,000 right now (although that’s not the actual number of submits). Still, did you know that the second story ever submitted to Sphinn, during the private beta testing, eventually hit the home page after the public launch? Yep. Props to Barry Schwartz for that story about Google Adwords’ Quality Score.

And you can still see story #001, which was on the receiving end of some strange bug in the Pligg software on at least one occasion. Weird.

So, that’s a look at the early days of Sphinn on its first birthday. Hmmmm. Let me find a couple other things quickly….

Everyone knows I think Sphinn rocks, and I don’t mind spending lots of time there as a user and moderator. It’s fun, usually educational, and only mildly frustrating (spam). Plus, like any good social media site, the more you give, the more you get: Sphinn is one of the five biggest sources of traffic to this blog, bringing more than 4,000 visits so far in 2008.

Sphinn has changed my life. Seriously. It’s consistently in my top 4-5 referral sources and has helped me get visibility from folks I never would have dreamed would find me after just a year (+/-) of blogging. And I’ve also read articles that have helped me become a better SEO, from Sphinn, that I never would have found otherwise.

Thanks to you and the rest of the moderators for all the hard work you put in.